Industrial processes for the production of manufactured parts may comprise cleaning and/or degreasing operations, of use in particular prior to certain treatment (painting for example) and/or assembly steps.
For example, it may be necessary to clean the machined parts in order to remove the turnings and/or dust generated during the machining.
It is sometimes necessary to implement degreasing operations in order to remove the oils present on the parts of interest which oils are likely to originate in particular from the machine tools used during their production.
Current cleaning/degreasing techniques consist for the most part in applying a jet of liquid with washing solution, or a jet of vapor to the parts to be treated.
For example, document WO 02/09894 describes a system in which the parts to be cleaned are subjected to a treatment jet consisting of a mixture of propellant gas and vapor.
For this purpose, this cleaning system comprises an application head comprising a tubular body for conducting the propellant gas, housed in which is an inner tube for conducting the vapor.
In operation, the vapor is delivered within the tubular body so as to ensure the mixing of the two fluids before the spraying thereof onto the part to be treated through a single outlet orifice.
Alternatively or additionally, these parts may also be submerged in a vessel filled with a treatment liquid.
The parts thus cleaned/degreased must then be subjected to a drying operation in order to remove the residual surface liquids.
However, these cleaning/degreasing installations do not ensure an optimal treatment of the parts; furthermore, they are not optimal from an energy efficiency point of view, and they often consume relatively large amounts of treatment fluid, in particular in the case of the treatment of parts having large dimensions, for example such as those used for the production of wind turbine structures (bearings, slewing rings and the constituent parts of the gearboxes, etc.).
It should be noted here that a high consumption of treatment fluid will again reduce the energy efficiency of the installations, due to the energy needed, on the one hand, to dry the parts after treatment, and on the other hand to recycle the recovered treatment fluids.